Categories

Categories are the rows of your budget. Every transaction belongs to one. Every month is the sum of its categories.

The three types

Savings is its own type so the dashboard can tell spending from moving money to where you want it later. The two are not the same.

Create or edit a category

1. Go to Categories.
2. Tap Add Category, or tap an existing one to edit.
3. Fill in:
   • Name and icon.
   • Type (income / expense / savings).
   • Default amount — the value the category pre-fills with each month.
   • Recurrence (see below).
4. Save.

Recurrence

Recurrence tells the app how often the category appears.

• Monthly — every month. The default for most categories.
• Biweekly — every other week. Useful for paychecks on a biweekly schedule.
• Weekly — every week.
• Annual — once per year, on a specific month/day. The category appears on the dashboard only in months where it's active.
• One-off — appears only in the months you explicitly add it to.

For each recurring category you can set a start and end date — useful for, say, a 12-month gym membership.

Active months

Even on a monthly recurrence, a category can be made active only in certain months. Open the category and adjust the active months picker — handy for something like Holiday Gifts (active Nov + Dec only).

Default amount vs. monthly planned amount

• Default amount lives on the category itself. It's the number a new month will pre-fill with.
• Monthly planned amount is the value you actually used in a specific month. Edit it on the Dashboard.

When you change the default, future months you haven't set by hand pick it up automatically. Past and current months aren't retroactively rewritten, and any month whose planned amount you edited directly stays locked at your value — see Amount schedules below for how to push a change into those locked months.

Amount schedules (raises, rate changes)

If a category's amount needs to change on a specific date — a salary bump on Aug 1, a rate increase — open the category, expand Amount History, and use Record Amount Change with the effective date. The new amount drives the budget from that month forward, and your earlier history is preserved.

Because BudgetLabs won't silently overwrite a month you set by hand, recording a change asks before touching locked months: if there are hand-set months on or after the effective date, you'll see "Apply this to N future months?". Choose Update them to recompute those months from the new amount — frequency-aware, so a bi-weekly income is multiplied by that month's paychecks — or Leave as-is to keep your manual values. Months you never touched always follow the latest amount automatically.

Default Split (recurring split rules)

If transactions assigned to this category should always split the same way — your phone bill is always 67% personal and 33% business, your AT&T charge is always partly your roommate's — set up a Default Split on the category instead of doing it manually each month.

1. Open the category and expand Default Split.
2. Pick a target category (e.g. Business Expenses) and the percent that should redirect there (e.g. 33).
3. Add as many target rows as you need. The header tells you what percent stays in this category vs. what's redirected.
4. Save.

When you add a transaction to this category — through the form, an import, or via Hank — a small "💡 This category has a default split — Apply" prompt appears. One tap fills the split section with your template values; you can still adjust before saving.

Templates are stored as percentages, not dollars, so they keep working when next month's bill is a different amount. A 33%-to-business rule still produces the right $103.30 split when the bill is $310 instead of $300.

Archive vs. delete

• Archive hides the category from the Dashboard but keeps every historical transaction intact. Recommended for almost every cleanup case.
• Delete is permanent and only available for categories that have never had a transaction.

When in doubt, archive.

What's next

• Auto-categorization rules — automatically tag imported transactions.
• The Lab — Insights — once you have a few months of categories logged, the Lab starts to show useful patterns.